Don’t you just hate people like Alex Anthopoulos? You know, the guy who makes you look bad by finishing his Christmas shopping in September? I’ll bet he was That Kid, the one who knocked down his two-hour math exam in 47 minutes. Guaranteed, he’s awake before the alarm goes off every morning.

Anthopoulos and his Toronto Blue Jays posse are heading to Nashville for baseball’s winter meetings next week. I hope somebody takes along a deck of cards.

The Jays’ GM had a long to-do list this off-season and he hit all the high points before American Thanksgiving. He has traded for eight players and dealt away nine others, plus a manager who didn’t want to be here. He has signed a boatload of free agents, including the two most expensive — Maicer Izturis and Melky Cabrera — of his three-year tenure.

He has changed the face of his pitching staff, a major priority at the end of the lost 2012 season and somehow found time to fill that sudden managerial opening. Now, while other GMs head to Tennessee, many of them under extreme pressure to make things happen, Anthopoulos is in a position to fine tune his roster through whatever means become available. He can wait for the phone to ring or he can zero in on specific targets.

What’s it going to be?

“Looking to do a bit of both,” Anthopoulos said Wednesday at the annual meeting of the Toronto Chapter of the Baseball Writers Association of America.

“We’re always going to field calls but we’re still trying to do things now. Even though we feel better about our club now as opposed to the end of the season, we still have areas to improve on: Depth in the rotation, getting better in the bullpen.

“Offensively I feel pretty good about the team and I feel good about the bench and if we can upgrade a position player, sure, we’d look to do that.”

Central to all he has accomplished was the 12-player earthquake of a trade with the Miami Marlins that changed the landscape for the franchise, not to mention the team’s free agent targets.

“It changed things,” he said. “It changed the dynamic of some of the players we had called on and started to talk to. For the sake of argument, we might have been looking at 10 players. We weren’t going to sign all 10. We may now be down to two or three that would still fit.

“Right now, the way the rotation is set up and not in any specific order: (Mark) Buehrle, (Josh) Johnson, (Ricky) Romero, (Brandon) Morrow, (J.A.) Happ. Of those guys, none is a zero-to-three (years of service) player. We said from the outset we weren’t going to guarantee Happ that fifth spot. He’s definitely a frontrunner and going to compete for it. We’d have to feel that anybody we get, especially if we were going to guarantee him a contract, it would have to be an upgrade over that current five.

“So, the likelihood is for us to make a minor-league free agent signing.”

On the odd chance that someone overwhelms Anthopoulos with another opportunity that would add even more to a payroll that is already destined to top $120 million, team president Paul Beeston said he thinks ownership won’t blink.

“It would depend on whether it makes sense,” said Beeston. “We had actually gotten close on something else previously and had gone to ownership and gotten permission but we didn’t execute on it. So when Alex did this (Miami) deal and then signed Melky Cabrera, we had been down the road before.

“From where we are now, if we asked for more and it made sense, I think the answer is still yes.”

While fans have been impatient to see evidence of the Jays’ contention they would spend money at the big league level when the time was right, Beeston says that without the millions spent on organizational infrastructure, the team would still be wallowing.

“There’s smart money and there’s dumb money,” said Beeston. “We want to spend smart money. The goal is to make the team sustainable on an ongoing basis. The reason we could (expand payroll) now is all the money we spent the last three years on the farm system.”

Anthopoulos hopes to have an inventory of a half-dozen potential starters as depth behind the starting five, though he hopes to only need three or four of them.

“You look at the teams that win, they don’t normally have to use 10 or 11 starters,” said Anthopoulos. “When it gets to that point, something has gone wrong: Guys are not performing or someone’s getting hurt.”

Any changes among the team’s position players would likely come in the form of a trade, if something is offered next week that offers some offensive upgrades, though he says he’s not in the market for any additional free agent position players.

Sponsored Links

Blue Jays not done dealing just yet

Don’t you just hate people like Alex Anthopoulos? You know, the guy who makes you look bad by finishing his Christmas shopping in September? I’ll bet he was That Kid, the one who knocked down his two-hour math exam in 47 minutes. Guaranteed, he’s awake before the alarm goes off every morning.

Anthopoulos and his Blue Jays posse are heading to Nashville for baseball’s winter meetings next week. I hope somebody takes along a deck of cards.

The Jays’ GM had a long to-do list this off-season and he hit all the high points before American Thanksgiving. He has traded for eight players and dealt away nine others, plus a manager who didn’t want to be here. He has signed a boatload of free agents, including the two most expensive — Maicer Izturis and Melky Cabrera — of his three-year tenure.

He has changed the face of his pitching staff, a major priority at the end of the lost 2012 season and somehow found time to fill that sudden managerial opening. Now, while other GMs he